Stem Cell-Based Tactics for the Modeling and Treatment of Neurological Disorders

Neurological disorders such as diverse neurodegenerative diseases and neural tumors have posed significant challenges to the well-being of the individuals and the healthcare systems of the economic society worldwide. Despite the robust progress in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological disorders in clinical practice, the continuous recurrence and deterioration attribute to the multifactorial conditions and the underlying regulatory network are still intractable for clinicians to pinpoint their exact pathogenesis and propose effective countermeasures. Stem cells are populations with unique self-renewal and multi-lineage differentiation properties, which are extensively involved in early embryonic development, disease modeling, pharmacological screening, and disease interventions including neurological disorders. Consequently, they represent a novel tactics with promising prospects for the purposes of refractory and recurrent neurological disease administration alone or integrated with the multifaceted innovations in bioengineering and biomedicine. In this review article, we mainly outline the methodology of neural differentiation of human stem cells including human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) and neural stem cells (NSCs), the construction and application of stem cell-based neural organoids for diverse neural disorder modeling, together with the stem cell-based regimens including mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and hPSCs-derived immune cells (e.g., natural killer cells, chimeric antigen receptor-transduced T cells) for neural tumor administration. Furthermore, the promising prospects and the concomitant challenges of stem cell-based tactics for neurological disorders have also be expounded. Collectively, we are aiming to put forward the state-of-the-art renewal of stem cell-based preclinical and clinical investigations, which would benefit the further development of novel therapeutic options for neural disorders including neurodegenerative diseases.